János Fehér

Leadership – A Values-Work Perspective


Chapter 2. The Evolution and Nature of Transformational Leadership1

Transformational leadership, as part of the ‘new leadership’ school of thought, is a representative leadership trend of our age. Its principles became successful and gained wide publicity owing to the works written by its scholars as well as through the statements and confessions of company leaders and consultants. Its central ideas were disseminated through a wide variety of academic, organizational, media and educational channels. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, this approach had followed on the trait, behavioural and situational/contingency theories in the evolution of leadership thought. The earlier historical approaches had placed the leader-follower dyad into focus and laid an emphasis on small group phenomena. They targeted the issue of influencing people for goal achievement, but left some crucial questions unanswered, especially as regards the role and methodology of large-scale transformations. All in all, the following trends became evident by the late twentieth century: a) a recognition of an urging need for catalysing and implementing organizational level change by the leader, and, also, by informal leadership, on all levels; b) a recognition of the value of using certain elements of leadership style best referred to as transformational, such as heroic, powerful, charismatic and visionary leadership (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2004, 741); and, c) a recognition of the need to invest into people through training and development, delegating and empowerment (Mullins, 2007, 516; Yukl, 2010, 133).

Leadership – A Values-Work Perspective

Tartalomjegyzék


Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2023

ISBN: 978 963 454 874 4

In the final decades of the 20th century, in the era of the birth of the so called ‘new-leadership’ – and at the same time as the growing understanding about organizational culture – work on and through values, as a leverage and component of leadership has gained importance. The issue of values received special emphasis since the GLOBE research identified value-based behaviour as a core element of the (neo-)charisma of leaders. In the light of these conceptual developments, it seems to be paradoxical why values-work has not been more extensively used so far for conceptualizing and defining leadership.

Considering the values context of establishing goals, offering purpose, and meaning, dealing with followers’ perceptions and expectations, promoting a mission, etc., in this book leadership will be dealt with from a values-work perspective.

In the first part some of the underlying and specifically related – including ’transformational’ – leadership historical tendencies will be touched upon.

The subsequent parts will be devoted to conceptual problems of values representation and values-related leadership practices at different, namely interpersonal, organizational, and societal levels.

Beyond theoretical discussions this monograph offers illustrations of some key concepts by including checklists of, survey results about, and examples on values-driven, like transformational and developmental leadership behaviours. This way it can be used not only by academics, students but by leadership practitioners, i.e., ’values workers’ as well.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/feher-leadership-a-values-work-perspective//

BibTeXEndNoteMendeleyZotero

Kivonat
fullscreenclose
printsave